Slide: 2 /of 8.Caption: Caption: His algorithm, a few dozen lines of code using the OpenCV computer vision software tool, runs on a tiny Raspberry Pi computer and matches a human figure in an intersection with a red light.Dries Depoorter

Slide: 3 /of 8.Caption: Caption: Then it leaves the decision to the person looking at the screen: press a red button to email a screenshot of the jaywalker to the local police or leave him or her to harmlessly break the law, unaware of being watched.Dries Depoorter/Ward Oosterlijnck

Slide: 4 /of 8.Caption: Caption: An example screenshot and email sent to the police. "Most" gallery visitors will choose to report the jaywalker, Depoorter says.Dries Depoorter

Slide: 5 /of 8.Caption: Caption: In his latest exhibition he takes a softer approach, selling framed prints of jaywalkers his software has detected. The price of each print is the fine for jaywalking in the place where the photo was taken.Dries Depoorter/Ward Oosterlijnck

Slide: 6 /of 8.Caption: Caption: In a more masochistic, earlier privacy experiment, Depoorter wrote a piece of software that randomly posted a screenshot from his computer once a day, unpredictably revealing his most private affairs. Here it caught him looking up directions.
Dries Depoorter

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Slide: 7 /of 8.Caption: Caption: Another work he titled "Tinder In" juxtaposed random people's Tinder portraits with their LinkedIn profile photos, to show the different faces they publicly presented.Dries Depoorter

Slide: 8 /of 8.Caption: Caption: In a project called "Here," he broadcast his location continuously from his iPhone to a web page for a month, showing the Google Street view image for his location at all times.Dries Depoorter

Slide: 2 /of 8Caption: Caption: His algorithm, a few dozen lines of code using the OpenCV computer vision software tool, runs on a tiny Raspberry Pi computer and matches a human figure in an intersection with a red light.Dries Depoorter

Slide: 3 /of 8Caption: Caption: Then it leaves the decision to the person looking at the screen: press a red button to email a screenshot of the jaywalker to the local police or leave him or her to harmlessly break the law, unaware of being watched.Dries Depoorter/Ward Oosterlijnck

Slide: 4 /of 8Caption: Caption: An example screenshot and email sent to the police. "Most" gallery visitors will choose to report the jaywalker, Depoorter says.Dries Depoorter

Slide: 5 /of 8Caption: Caption: In his latest exhibition he takes a softer approach, selling framed prints of jaywalkers his software has detected. The price of each print is the fine for jaywalking in the place where the photo was taken.Dries Depoorter/Ward Oosterlijnck

Slide: 6 /of 8Caption: Caption: In a more masochistic, earlier privacy experiment, Depoorter wrote a piece of software that randomly posted a screenshot from his computer once a day, unpredictably revealing his most private affairs. Here it caught him looking up directions.
Dries Depoorter

Slide: 7 /of 8Caption: Caption: Another work he titled "Tinder In" juxtaposed random people's Tinder portraits with their LinkedIn profile photos, to show the different faces they publicly presented.Dries Depoorter

Slide: 8 /of 8Caption: Caption: In a project called "Here," he broadcast his location continuously from his iPhone to a web page for a month, showing the Google Street view image for his location at all times.Dries Depoorter

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In the small town of Fredericton, Canada, a woman crosses a quiet intersection in front of a church cathedral. Unbeknownst to her, a nearby webcam catches her in the street, along with the red light behind her—evidence of her crime.

The webcam’s public feed, like thousands of others like it, is accessible to anyone who can find its URL with a Google search. At an art gallery thousands of miles away, a tiny Raspberry Pi computer is streaming the video to a monitor while it analyzes the footage with a simple computer vision algorithm. It instantly snitches, flashing, “WOULD YOU LIKE TO REPORT THE JAYWALKER?” on the screen. If you’re a visitor at this gallery, you’ll face a choice: hit a red button in front of the computer, and it will send a screenshot of the incident in an email to the nearest police precinct, potentially costing her a $42 fine. Or you can let the oblivious lawbreaker go on her way.

This demonstration of surveillance-turned-art, titled “Jaywalking,” presents the sort of uncomfortably easy privacy invasion that Dries Depoorter has made his trademark. The 25-year-old Belgian artist has a talent for assembling widely accessible images and video streams into exhibits that feel provocatively intrusive. And he hopes they’ll spark his audience to consider the very real possibilities of using public data to invade personal privacy—or at least what we once believed to be private. “You have a choice, to send the screenshot to the police or not,” says Depoorter. “I wanted the visitors to think. To
get the feeling of having this power.”

Depoorter in front of his “Jaywalking” installation’s three screens.Nichon Glerum

On Saturday, a retrospective show assembling years of Depoorter’s surveillance-themed works opens at the Z33 gallery in Hassert, Belgium. It won’t actually include the real-time, three-screen jaywalking feed that he’s displayed in past shows. Instead, he’s taking a softer approach, selling framed prints of jaywalkers whom his webcam monitoring software has detected—each one priced at the cost of a jaywalking fine in the place where it was taken. (“I liked the idea that the money goes to the artist rather than to the police,” he says.) But Depoorter’s first solo exhibition will also include a collection of previous spying experiments, from those performed on himself to one that surveils broad swaths of an American city in real time.

Depoorter’s installation called “Seattle Crime Cams” streams real-time video from publicly accessible, city-owned traffic cameras in Seattle to a wall of monitors. Though the city’s online cameras were meant to show only a single still image updated every minute, he says he found the full video file in the site’s code and was able to instead access the continuous stream. He’s paired those surveillance feeds with police and fire alerts and dispatch audio made available as part of Seattle’s Open Data program. And he’s synched that feed to the screen so that the videos show the closest camera to the location described in the audio for a disturbingly voyeuristic experience. Visitors can choose whether to view video feeds with the most alerts or the least. As in “Jaywalking,” they become an active participant in the surveillance act. “I found it pretty strange, that the police were sharing all this data,” he says. “I had to show what you can do with this… You see just how much surveillance there is.”

Here’s a video of “Seattle Crime Cams” in action:

In the “Seattle Crime Cams” piece, Depoorter argues, it’s not any single feed of public data that leads to a sense of intrusion, but combining the images with real-time emergency services reports. He points to the same notion of combining two sources of public data to produce a privacy violation in another, older piece he calls “Tinder In,” which matches a person’s Tinder photos and neatly frames them with the same individual’s LinkedIn profile photo. The effect of that controversial series is to show how internet users live double lives, each on display simultaneously to anyone who looks. One of those “Tinder In” pairs shows Depoorter himself in his work context and a Amsterdam vacation photo he shows potential dates.

In fact, Depoorter began his explorations of privacy by violating his own. In his first experiment as an art student at the KASK School of Art in Ghent in 2010, he recorded all his conversations and the sounds around him for a 24-hour period and posted them online and in a gallery installation. Some conversations with friends and family that he considered more sensitive, however, he made private, and instead posted links to sell the audio based on its privacy value to him. Later, he set up a piece of software to track his iPhone’s locations for a month and post Google Streetview images from those locations to a page on his website.

In his most masochistic project, he set up his computer to capture a full screenshot at a random time every day and post it to Twitter, and allowed a friend to change his Twitter password so he wouldn’t be able to delete any images. Since he never knew when the screenshot would come, his Macbook became his own personal panopticon. He stopped visiting NSFW sites, shrunk his chat windows with friends to show only a single line of conversation, and even ceased googling certain questions that might be embarrassing. “You don’t want other people to see your stupid Google search queries,” he says. “There was this feeling that there’s always someone watching. It’s not the NSA, but my friends and family.”

Depoorter is hesitant to spell out his motivations for these stunts, instead preferring that people see them online or in the context of his show and come to their own conclusions. But in experiments like “Seattle Crime Cams” and “Jaywalking,” which use real-world data, he admits that he does want to warn his audience about what’s possible, and to hint how such perfectly legal and public forms of privacy violation won’t always be limited to art. “The police can automatically detect you jaywalking. They have much more knowledge than me. They can link it to a database, and tomorrow they can make this all automatic. You jaywalk and tomorrow you pay a fee,” he says. “Is it ok that the police can automatically give fines for crossing a red light? These are the important questions.”